Analyzing the story behind Doodles: "Visual Marshmallow" with a valuation of 700 million US dollars

Moni

Odaily资深作者

2022-09-13 16:31

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It's not special to be a T-shirt, it's special to be a Gucci.

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It's not special to be a T-shirt, it's special to be a Gucci.

This article is from:FastCompany, Original Author: KC IFEANYI

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In June 2022, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian made an unexpected appearance at the NFT NYC conference, announcing that his venture capital institution 776 Fund had invested in a new company, which he said would "set various standards" in the blockchain field , and even has the potential to become a global entertainment brand - this company is Doodles.

Since its official launch in October 2021, Doodles has become one of the hottest blue-chip NFT projects currently. In addition to attracting purchases from Pranksy and DJ Steve Aoki, Alexis Ohanian also owns several. He said that these NFTs remind him of My 5-year-old daughter Olympia.One year later today, September 13, 2022,Doodles Announces $54M Equity Funding at a $704M Valuation

776 founding partner Katelin Holloway believes that Doodles will become the most inclusive, creative, and happy media brand in the Web3 field, and has the ability to define the NFT industry. In fact, many NFT holders and creators are thinking about a question: how can digital images be promoted as a form of social media? With this question in mind, let's take a look at how Doodles has gained a firm foothold in the shaky crypto market and developed into the next generation of "entertainment empire".

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At the beginning of the business, cut into the track

The three co-founders of Doodles, Evan Keast, Jordan Castro and Scott Martin, all come from Dapper Labs. Evan Keast and Jordan Castro are the core developers of Cryptokitties. With the great success of this NFT digital pet game, the two At the beginning of 2021, they began to try to build their own NFT projects, and also hoped to be "community-centered" and "truly fair". When talking about token distribution and ensuring fair delivery, Evan Keast said frankly that "although there will be a large number of NFT projects in early 2021, the transparency is not high."

After thinking for a while, Evan Keast and Jordan Castro decided to start with PFP-like NFT projects. According to the NFT analysis platform NFTGo data, the market value of PFP NFT at that time was as high as 13.3 billion US dollars, with sufficient market depth. Therefore, the first task for the two is to choose an NFT with an "iconic appearance".

Scott Martin's work has appeared in the products of major companies such as Google, DropBox and Adobe, and his cartoon characters have bold outlines, bright colors and eyes that are difficult to keep in touch with the human face. These features have attracted many fans. After an exchange of ideas with Evan Keast and Jordan Castro, a whimsical world of humans, flames, pickles and popsicles emerged, with the support of NFT technology infrastructure service provider West Coast NFT, 10,000 spawnable Doodles NFT finally Official launch in October 2021.

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Lock the community, put an end to hype

In fact, Doodles encountered some controversy in its early days.

About a month before Doodles went live, the team temporarily closed Discord. At that time, there were already more than 1,000 members in the forum. The closure of the community communication platform caused an uproar, but Evan Keast did not take it seriously and was extremely firm:

“We were annoyed at the amount of hype and noise in the NFT market at the time, with many speculative NFTs flocking, artists or founders who seemed to come out of nowhere minted and distributed NFTs at will, but they didn’t think about project development at all. There will be no roadmap, so we want to try different approaches."

With their playful designs and pastel colors, Doodles are like "visual cotton candy." Much of Doodles' success stems from Scott Martin's approachable and recognizable characters. Scott Martin explains: “PFP is essentially what everyone wants to identify with, and if it’s angry, negative, forceful, or overly complex, it’s hard for brands, individuals, and images to connect. It’s a good feeling.” – On this point, Scott Martin also points out that inclusivity was a top priority when creating the Doodles characters so they resonate with the community.

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show "dominance"

In the development of Doodles, the community treasury "Doodlebank" has played a key role, where NFT holders can vote on certain aspects of the project, such as the creation of official derivative projects Noodles and Pukenza, and the determination of the development roadmap of the expansion project Space Doodles wait.

However, in order to become a global entertainment brand, the Doodles team also needed a CEO with IP building expertise.

At the beginning of 2022, Billboard President Julian Holguin was quickly interested in this project because of the business need to get in touch with Doodles and do some simple consulting work for them. In May, Julian Holguin decided to join Doodles as CEO.The joining of Julian Holguin undoubtedly brought great help to Doodles. He began to build a brand around Doodles while exploring large-scale commercialization. “Doodles has a lot of cash on its balance sheet, which can fully support a mature technology and media company. There is nothing special about blockchain technology or NFTs creating new experiences for potential customers, but”

You have to have a brand and be able to tell stories. It is not special to be a T-shirt, but it is very special to be a Gucci. This is the meaning of Doodles in the NFT ecosystem.

In order to ensure brand cohesion, Doodles chose to only allow NFT holders to have limited IP rights, which seems somewhat incompatible with the idea of decentralization. But if we look at Yuga Labs' strategy, we will find that Doodles' approach is actually very reliable. Yuga Labs acquired Larva Labs earlier this year and subsequently released full IP rights to Bored Ape Yacht Club holders, as well as CryptoPunks and Meebits, setting a high bar for NFT projects. This move paid off quickly, especially in the bear market, these NFT projects under Yuga Labs still maintained a high value, and did not "discount" because of the bad market environment.Doodles is looking to forge higher-level partnerships and possibly even be acquired in the future.

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out of the bear market

Doodles has a very friendly "look" and a superior team to realize their plan to create a global entertainment brand, but one thing is hard to ignore-the NFT market is still very depressed. In the context of the crypto bear market, global NFT sales in 2022 will hit a record low and have fallen by more than $4 billion. Doodles were not immune either, with sales down more than $100 million in June.However, the NFT market has not been in a slump. Innovative services such as ENS still attract a lot of attention, and some PFP NFT projects will definitely survive the market downturn. If you enter the Discord of Doodles, you will see that the community is still interacting and growing, and there are also various conference discussions and offline gatherings. 776 founding partner Katelin Holloway admitted that Doodles’ strong community was one of the main reasons they decided to support the company,”No Web3 company can survive without a strong community

Alexis Ohanian finally said: "Everyone can feel that the transition from bear to bull is coming, whether it is 6 months or 12 months, the real builders will be ready for that moment, and we have not slowed down at all. "

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